Thing to do to maintain your computer

Well this will be my first blog ever, and I am a little nervous about it. Anyways I have decided to start out with some things I commonly run across on my work bench. Things that do not get done in the users home and thus it lands on my bench for me to fix. I understand many people are thinking “Why would he do that?" Simple answer, I prefer to be helpful. I would explain it to you if I had your PC on the workbench. And besides maybe this will help someone out.




So here we go.

1. The biggest thing I see is that Microsoft Windows is not fully updated. Windows XP and Windows Vista are still receiving support from Microsoft currently. If your PC is not set to receive automatic updates, you should configure it. This protects you from all types of nastiness that can and will infect your computer. If you don’t want to have it happen automatically you should manually update.



2. No anti-virus / anti-virus is out of date. This is another HUGE problem. The number of virus’s' that are on the internet grows daily. They are getting more and more dangerous and crafty. Criminals have determined ways for a virus to steal account information. Lack of anti-virus or anti-virus with outdated definitions leaves you open to things like identity theft. It happened to my friend when they got into his bank account and cleaned him out. If you let your MacAfee or Norton subscriptions expire, your virus definitions will not update. If you want to save a buck you can download a free anti-virus for basic protection at http://free.avg.com .



3. No Anti Spyware - This goes along with the above; there are a good few free ones for use. Malwarebytes is handy, as is Super Anti Spyware. The thing here is that you have to run them manually if you do not purchase them, once a week or so should be good.



3. Hard Drive has never been defragmented-- Ok this is standard HD maintenance. A defrag in essence re-orders all the information on your disk. It takes a file scattered all over the disk and puts it together in one spot. Doesn’t sound like much does it? Here is why it helps. By keeping the files together there is less wear and tear on the moving parts inside the hard drive, thus extending the life of you disk. It also helps the machine to run faster as it can read and write to the disk faster.



4. Never ran a scandisk -- Scan disk helps you identify if your hard drive is going bad. If you run this fairly regular you should see if there are bad sectors. If there are come visit us, so we can order a new drive and install it. This will help prevent you from having a disk that just completely belly up.



5. Disk is dead / data recovery - If your disk is completely toasted, there is nothing I can do. We will have to send it to someone really expensive to recover your information. If it spins I can attempt to recover it, there is a 50 % chance of success. This brings me to the next part



6. BACKUP your information -- As life becomes more digital it is vital to back up your computer. Many people fail to do this. Those that I have met are very upset when I have to look at them and explain that I cannot recover their 5 years of pictures or the 30 Gig of music. Easiest solution, buy and external hard drive and use the software that comes with it to backup your system.



Well that’s all I have for now. If there are any questions you would like to see answered on this blog feel free to ask. Will answer as best I can